Ban the Nazis, Jack: Teaching Information “Ownership” in Information Literacy Instruction Megan Browndorf* In December 2018, Tumblr banned “pornographic images” and media outlets declared the death of Tumblr, comparing it to LiveJournal’s decrease in popularity in the United States after it had made the same move.1 A friend of mine phrased her feelings on this ban in a telling manner, while sharing the Jezebel article: “This is why I don’t do much social media anymore. Third time my internet home has been bulldozed.”2 This cycle is familiar—an online space regarded as “an internet home,” makes a change that is unexpected and unwanted in its community of users for business purposes and this community reacts with outrage. We see it in the ongoing reaction to the Cambridge Analytica and Internet Research Agency scandals on Facebook. And we see the same dynamic in Twitter’s response to its users continued calls to make changes that limit harassment and hate speech. A “feeling of home” is one of the motivations behind users’ expression of psychological ownership—the feeling that a concept, idea, object, or space belongs to an individual and they thus have certain rights over it.3 Other motivations include a need for personal control, the expression and development of self-identity, and self-understanding.4 Social Media is well-designed to encourage these feelings and thus to encourage a feeling of psychological ownership over the networks and digital content that users produce on their platforms.5 However, what the example of Tumblr highlights is that conflicts are likely to arise when the psychological ownership feelings of users are at odds with their material rights of control. Users may feel threatened when the material corporate control manifests itself leading to feelings of betrayal or even anger.6 This anger may be righteous. After all, these digital spaces operate as if they were public spaces and use the guise of neutrality to position themselves as platforms through which public communication must flow. Haber- mas refers to the encroachment of corporate control into public space as “re-feuedalization of the public sphere,” by carving out niches that encourage public discourse in private spaces platforms such as Google and Facebook have enclosed any digital commons which may have existed.7 Possession is increasingly being replaced by access, meaning that platforms can control content usage and sharing in ways that would never have been possible be- fore through technologies such as end user license agreements.8 The rights of ownership are increasingly being replaced with psychological ownership in both private and common properties surrounding information goods. Further, the corporations that librarians work with to provide access to the scholarly commons have learned how operating the infrastructure can be more profitable than producing or even selling services and materials. How do we teach students to operate in this information environment? What strategies and tendencies do we need to help students develop in order to navigate institutions—both scholarly and non-scholarly—that seek to pivot the creation and use of information away from common needs and toward corporate profit? The information literature student must recognize that infrastructure determines what we can and cannot do with information and that these infrastructures are, by and large, not governed by users, but rather by profit-moti- * Megan Browndorf, East European Liaison and Reference Librarian, Georgetown University, mb2187@george- town.edu 630 Ban the Nazis, Jack: Teaching Information “Ownership” in Information Literacy Instruction 631 vated organizations. It is vital that we bring an understanding of the role of corporate power in information use, development, and sharing into our information literacy instruction if we are to help our students think critically about the information they use and create.9 To do this we must be explicit about how psychological ownership is employed to encourage participation in the infrastructures of organizations such as Twitter and Elsevier while these organizations maintain deciding control over how their infrastructures develop and thus what users are able to share and how they are able to do it. The Myths of Ownership and the Commons It is beneficial to corporations to encourage feelings of ownership among their consumers and in turn to support the continued myth of the digital commons. Individuals who feel higher psychological ownership toward a target, value that target higher and are more likely to engage in stewardship behaviors over it.10 In cases of collective ownership, psychological ownership is both developed and maintained through participa- tion in the development of rules and governance over space.11 The desire of the open source community to exchange knowledge is one example.12 Development of psychological ownership is instrumental to the de- sire to participate in open source communities and participation cyclically leads to increased psychological ownership.13 However these spaces are always threatened with enclosure—the mechanism through which institutions held in collective ownership are privatized. In a space that has already experienced enclosure or has always been privately controlled, psychological ownership can be manipulated to encourage steward- ship behaviors over resources that are not, in fact, held in common. Take “crowdsourcing” as an example, Yuksel, Darmody, and Venkatraman found that consumer participation through crowdsourced materials engendered feelings of psychological ownership—despite the fact that the labor of the consumer was not remunerated financially and that the consumer had no legal rights over that material.14 The authors suggest this dynamic called “co-creation” has the capability to increase user satisfaction with services and further, their loyalty. While users may be happier with the end product, it is important to remember that they are also providing labor to private organizations paid only by the usage of the product itself.15 This is not collective ownership, but it feels like collective ownership. This dynamic is a byproduct of what Nick Srnicek refers to in his book of the same name as “platform capitalism.” A platform is privately developed infrastructure designed to encourage interactions between content producers and consumers and through which the platform is solely or primarily responsible for governance.16 They are, by definition, rent-seeking institutions which seek to make profit not through competition with like corporations nor by creating a product to be consumed, but rather by entrenching the importance of their infrastructure to the ways that people live.17 Platforms have developed in tandem with the whittling down of consumers’ and creators’ intellectual prop- erty rights. Intellectual property, the rights associated with ownership are determined not by possession, but rather by law.18 On the one hand is the creator who may be required to give up some degree of ownership rights in order that material be published—in scholarly communication, for example, it is common for journals to demand that authors relinquish copyright claims over their articles. On the other hand, the principle of “ex- haustion”—that a copyright holder relinquishes some rights to govern use once a user acquires an item—has all but disappeared in the digital realm as publishers and other corporations involved in intellectual property have developed methods, such as End-User License Agreements, and products, such as streaming services, that have curtailed the rights of intellectual property users once granted through exhaustion.19 In this environment, the power to govern usage lies with the intermediary, with the platform. Platforms of knowledge distribution are ideal environments for encouraging the development of psychological ownership APRIL 10–13, 2019 • CLEVELAND, OHIO 632 Megan Browndorf with the end goal of using free labor to “cocreate” product. If the platform is alluring enough, a corporation only needs to provide the infrastructure, and individuals will populate it with “content.”20 While it may be ques- tionable to call social interactions labor, it is necessarily true that without these interactions, these platforms would not be profitable.21 Indeed, Terranova critiques exactly this dynamic nearly 20 years ago in spaces such as America Online. She notes that because individuals use spaces and care about them, they work to make them better regardless of the final destination of any material profits. Further she suggests that this labor dynamic is integral to the way that the internet functions.22 Furthermore, platforms position themselves as neutral spaces that are only providing the infrastructure to make user creativity possible, but in doing so, they constrain activity toward that which makes a profit for the owners of the infrastructure.23 This tension—between presenting a space as democratic or neutral while constraining its use to extract profit—leads to what Smith, Hulland, and Thompson refer to as “the dark side of psychological ownership.” That is to say that when corporations succeed in developing feelings of psychological ownership in their users in order to push them toward content creation and stewardship—they often inadver- tently cause users to feel that they should have rights in determining decisions made to the platform, particularly if that corporation acts toward profit rather than what a user determines to be the best interest of the commu-